Straight off the back of Boyfriend Material, I went into Husband Material, book two of Alexis Hall’s London Calling trilogy, published in August 2022. If the first book was about Luc O’Donnell convincing the world he could be someone’s boyfriend, the second is about him convincing himself he can be someone’s husband — and it turns out that’s a much harder trick.
Two years on from the fake-dating scheme that started it all, Luc and Oliver are a real couple heading to a run of other people’s weddings, and Luc panics his way into an accidental proposal. The book is structured like Four Weddings and a Funeral — three weddings, a funeral and a wedding and that structure is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, for better and for worse.
The better: I loved spending more time with Luc and Oliver actually together, facing grown-up problems instead of tabloid ones. What does marriage mean to two men who grew up with wildly different templates for love? Does commitment need a ceremony to count? Hall trades the will-they-won’t-they of book one for something harder to write and, when it lands, more rewarding: two people who already love each other, trying to work out if they want the same life.
Oliver gets just as much of that scrutiny as Luc does, which is where the book earns its keep. He spent book one as the steady, uptight one holding Luc together; here, it’s Oliver’s turn to unpack the “good son” performance he’s been running his whole life, and his parents’ quiet, well-mannered disapproval turns out to cut deeper than any tabloid headline ever did to Luc. Watching the golden boy of the couple turn out to be just as flawed as his disaster boyfriend is one of the book’s best tricks.
READ MORE: My review of Boyfriend Material, the book that started it all
The worse, and my only real complaint: Husband Material spends a lot of time with the wider cast. Bridget’s wedding opens the book, complicated by her fiancé Tom going missing before the ceremony. Miles, Luc’s ex who sold him out to the tabloids in book one, turns up at his own wedding with a new partner. The CRAPP crowd gets big set pieces of their own. All of it is fun, but every chapter spent on someone else’s drama is a chapter not spent on Luc and Oliver, and they’re the reason I picked the book up.
That said — Odile is still one of my favourite characters in fiction, and Bridge remains the best friend every rom-com hero deserves. I’ll take a crowded book with great side characters over a lonely one any day. I just wanted a little more of the two people on the cover.
Spoiler warning for the ending. The finale of Husband Material is genuinely divisive among Hall’s readers online — some feel short-changed by where Luc and Oliver land, having built up to a traditional wedding for 300 pages. For me, it’s the perfect, logical conclusion for both of them. Hall spends the whole book asking what Luc and Oliver actually want, as opposed to what a wedding day is supposed to look like, and the ending answers that question truthfully rather than neatly. I’d rather an ending that’s right for the characters than one that’s right for the genre. Plenty of readers wanted the big traditional wedding they’d been promised across three other people’s ceremonies; I wanted Luc and Oliver to stop performing a version of commitment that belonged to somebody else’s love story, and that’s exactly what they get.
One more thing worth flagging for anyone rereading: keep an eye out for Jonathan Forest, who has a brief cameo in Husband Material. He goes on to headline 10 Things That Never Happened, the first book in Hall’s Material World spin-off series, opposite a bed-and-bath store manager named Sam Becker. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment on a first read, and a genuine treat to spot on a second one — the kind of detail that makes rereading Hall’s backlist feel like its own reward.
My review of Father Material, the trilogy’s already-published final word on Luc and Oliver, is next. After the chaos of Husband Material — and everything it made me want for Luc and Oliver — I’m ready to see how Hall closes this saga out, and whether the “logical conclusion” I keep defending holds up as the ending of the whole story, not just this one book.